


The Potter's Field

by Sath



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Bad taxidermy, Canon Era, Formaldehyde gone wrong, Gen, Medical students, Poverty, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 07:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1091517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sath/pseuds/Sath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Courfeyrac catches Prouvaire in the act of burglary, then takes him out for drinks and some illegal burial at the Montparnasse Cemetery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Potter's Field

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Florizel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florizel/gifts).



Courfeyrac was walking through the Latin Quarter when he saw a truly queer act of defenestration. Someone was leaving Joly’s digs hind end foremost, but with difficulty. Courfeyrac leaned against the wall and took a quick inventory of the intruder, just in case he had to make a police report. The flailing legs were clothed in hose and wearing floppy ankle boots, and the wriggling rump was ample. Courfeyrac rapped his cane twice against the brick, triggering a cry of distress from inside.

“Hello there, Baron von Highfall! Why the deuce are you burgling Joly?

“Because I need his heart,” Prouvaire replied, a little bit breathless from his position.

“Joly’s a friendly fellow, did you try asking him first?”

“I did,” Prouvaire grumbled, twisting his hips in a way that suggested he needed assistance on the dismount. Courfeyrac took Prouvaire’s thighs into a comradely grip and lifted him down, nearly receiving an armful of burglar in the process. Prouvaire dusted himself off, yanked his doublet back into place, and held up a jar with a chunk of discolored meat in it. “He told me I could help myself while he was out, but he forgot to give me a key and his porter knows me too well.”

“Not a figurative heart, then.”

Prouvaire turned the jar, allowing the sunlight to catch in the formaldehyde. “No.”

The heart was gray. Not a very enlivening color for a heart to be; strange how it was such an unimpressive organ when devoid of its red cape.

“Is that a human heart, or did it belong to some lesser being?” Courfeyrac asked.

Prouvaire read the exceedingly dirty label on the bottom of the jar. “Syphilitic male, around forty years old.”

“Ah, then the order of being depends entirely on convenience. What are you planning on doing with Monsieur?”

“Burying him.”

The proper expression of surprise was cut off by the need to pull Prouvaire and Monsieur out of the path of a drayman’s cart.

“Watch yourselves!” the drayman yelled.

Courfeyrac tipped his hat, observing out of the corner of his eye that Prouvaire was cradling the jar to his chest. “Unless the medical students are even more gruesome-minded than rumors suggest, I think most of him has probably already been buried, and the rest of Monsieur is scattered as a saint.”

“Scattered without reverence. On the Day of Judgment, the saints will rise up and reign from every corner of the world and this unknown poor man will rest in pieces for a thousand years more, his soul condemned to Hell or Purgatory. Joly nearly _threw him out_ because of a bad batch of formaldehyde; no ragpicker can resell a rotten heart. The heart is a king in its kingdom, not as a tyrant but the vessel of His love, and I will not let this forgotten man go without it.”

Now that Courfeyrac was forcing himself to look at the heart a little more closely, it did seem to be rotting within its solution.

“There is no dignity in poverty,” Courfeyrac said. “First the namelessness of the common grave, then dug up, cut up, resold, and discarded. Assuming that Monsieur came originally from the Hôtel-Dieu, his body was probably buried in the hospital plot of the Montparnasse Cemetery, and that is where we must slip his heart.”

Prouvaire’s expression was only doubtful for a moment; everyone was already credulous with Courfeyrac, but Prouvaire made a habit of finding sincerity in everyone, which eventually always soured his feelings towards the living but made him exceedingly reverent of the dead.

“However, we need a plan. Resurrectionists prowl Montparnasse, so the guards will not look well upon two young men, who may or may not be medical students, digging around the common grave. I vote an elaborate but practical ruse. We pretend to be drunk, or for better verisimilitude, inebriate ourselves, and I will cause a scene of grief over a deserving grave while you sneak Monsieur into the trench. Now then, let us give this reliquary a wake.”

The Latin Quarter, due to its high student population, was well-watered. Courfeyrac escorted Prouvaire to a particularly dark den of learning, a wine-shop named the Leech, which declared its allegiance to the medical school by decorating with organs pickled more effectively than Monsieur, and some inspiringly bad taxidermy. Prouvaire chose to sit in the shop’s darkest corner, underneath an overstuffed springbok and a jar filled with blue eyes. They very quickly proceeded to become drunk.

“Are you mocking me?” Prouvaire asked sweetly, his mouth a little reddened by wine. Monsieur was sitting between their glasses, and had been the subject of several toasts already.

“Presenting you with a question. What has Monsieur done – or not done – to deserve the liberation denied to Mlle Leech’s tenants?”

“You _are_ mocking me.”

Courfeyrac nudged Prouvaire’s leg with his foot. “Testing.”

Prouvaire scowled down at the heart. “We are bound to the people in our lives. Joly is my friend, so I must take care of his things when he will not. It is a heart in a jar. It is a dead man’s heart in a jar. It is one heart, in one jar, in a city filled with medical schools. But I know about this particular heart, and it is so easy for me to try to do the right thing, that I should not neglect to take an action simply because it is on a small scale.”

“Spoken like a true idealist.” Courfeyrac turned Monsieur’s jar over, so he could read the label himself. “This says he was executed. You did not tell me he was a criminal.”

“It should not change anything. I assume you have never read Villon’s ‘Ballad of the Hanged Men,’ have you? _Our brothers who live after us, do not harden your hearts against us, for if you take pity, God will sooner have mercy on you. You must not scorn that we call you brothers, though we were killed by justice._ Justice which may come for us, as well.”

Courfeyrac looked into the murky jar, wondering if he might be able to see some of his earlier compassion swimming among the flecks of rot. He still had some pity for the dead man, but the little specter of uncertainty had him hoping he was looking at the heart of a monster.

It was soothing, to think that justice was ever dealt cleanly.

When they at last arrived at the Montparnasse Cemetery, the guard waved them in without questions. It may have been because Prouvaire had slipped the jar into an improbably large inner coat pocket, or it may have been something about Courfeyrac’s face which seemed suited for bereavement. The weather had turned colder since they left the wine shop, and the wind blowing through the leafless trees turned sharp against their skin. The Hôtel-Dieu’s plot was in a particularly barren place on the eastern end – the common grave was nothing but a long trench in the ground, which stank. A crow was perched on the hospital’s sign, a fitting reminder of the graverobbing occurring both within and without the law.

In the end, Courfeyrac did not even have to cause a scene; there was already one unfolding, as a woman frantically dug through the common grave looking for the corpse of a former tenant, and she was preparing to collect his unpaid rent from his teeth. Prouvaire emptied out Monsieur while the woman arranged to bribe the watchman with a molar, and that was all. _Requiem æternam dona ei Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei._

Courfeyrac had moved away from the Latin Quarter for a reason - death was absolutely not a topic of conversation in his lodgings. There were no slow, inexorable indignities, other than Marius’s wardrobe. He picked his battles more carefully than Prouvaire did, and he felt his soul was lighter for it. Case in point being that he hired a cab to take them home from the cemetery, and would not hear Prouvaire’s protests when he paid the fare.

“If even Achilles would rather be a living servant than a dead hero, could you say a word in death’s favor?” Courfeyrac asked.

Prouvaire answered him by gently pressing his lips against Courfeyrac’s, a kiss too tender to hint of sex but too close for Courfeyrac to pretend it was only the touch of a friend.

“We live in a new world,” Prouvaire said, “and we have been given immortal life.”

“I certainly hope I find some more wisdom along the way, or else I’ll be in for an immortality of law school, rather like Bahorel – though I do not think you would kiss me again, if I grew a mustache like his.”

Prouvaire laughed at last, and Courfeyrac found himself able to smile back.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks go out to tenlittlebullets for being an utter research guru and tracking down what the medical schools in Paris did with their unclaimed bodies in the 1830s.
> 
> Apologies for the sometimes inaccurate, but always awkward translation of Villon's 'Ballade des pendus.'


End file.
